Categories
Geek Love

Newly Digital…

Remember the days when everything digital was so new?

When I was in 4th grade, my school (St. Patrick’s, Kankakee, IL.) received a gift of two Apple II computers. Back then, no one had personal computers in their homes yet – they were new to the market. One of the teachers started offering a Saturday morning computer club, and we could come in and learn how to program cool things. The main thing I remember doing was creating a pixel-based image of a rainbow on the computer, which required that I plot each pixel of color based on the coordinates and the color I wanted it to be. I would spend hours with graph paper, drawing out pictures that I could later program on the computer.

My Mom was a teacher’s aide for the gifted program at the public school at the time, and they had a TRS-80 computer at school. I remember when they sent it off to have it upgraded from 2mb of RAM to 4mb. (Or was it 2k to 4k? Wow, it’s been a long time. I don’t remember.) We got a TRS-80 for our house for Christmas that year. (The Commodore 64 came out right afterwards, but she went with the brand we knew.) It didn’t have a monitor of it’s own, we hooked it up to an A/B switch on the back of the color TV. The “disk drive” was a cassette tape player which was always pretty tempermental about what it wanted to record. I remember entering a program in from one of the books that came with it – it displayed one of Robert Frost’s poems, and then the screen would fill up with snow.

My junior and senior year in high school (Cypress Creek, Houston, TX), I took Computer Science and Computer Math. We still used floppy 5 1/4″ diskettes. I learned things like C, Fortran, Pascal, and a variety of other things I can’t remember today. All of my friends were taking the word processing class – I was more interested in programming games or ways to improve my gaming skills that’s why I used services as Elo Boost to help me with this. When I started playing, I found this new game called CS:GO and honestly I was like addicted to it for months!! I would always be playing to get a higher rank and then I finally found out about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive boost where I could boost my ranking.. without playing!! Plus I had Blogomania to keep me busy after hours), but computers are still a constant part of my life, whether it is for research, for work, for fun, for blogging. All of it is something I never would have imagined back when we had that TRS-80 with the cassette tape drive.

This post inspired initially by Ste, along with Chris Pirillo and Andre Torrez, who wrote theirs as a part of Adam Kalsey’s Newly Digital Project.

By Christine

Christine is an Avenger of Sexiness. Her Superpower is helping Hot Mamas grow their Confidence by rediscovering their Beauty. She lives in the Heights in Houston, Texas, works as a boudoir photographer, and writes about running a Business of Awesome. In her spare time, she loves to knit, especially when she travels. She & her husband Mike have a food blog at Spoon & Knife.

18 replies on “Newly Digital…”

Haha, I didn’t even know about the Newly Digital project when I wrote that – I was just reflecting on how much things had changed. 🙂 Now I’ll have to read through everyone’s posts there… 😀

wow, we had one of those TRS-80s too! I still have some of those original tapes ( now rerecorded with badly dubbed 80s music.)

My first computer program was a kaleidescope that changed pixel by pixel….. wow.

Newly Digital
When people ask you about your first computer, what do they mean? I mean, do they mean the first one you ever used, the first one you assembled, the first one you monopolized, or the first one you purchased? I’m still not sure where it all began with m…

Newly Digital
He stood in the doorway that separated the PC and Mac sections of our computer lab. “Regina. I need to see you.” It wasn’t unusual for Will to come into the lab looking for me. He was a computing staff member and I was serving on the Academic Computing…

Comments are closed.